Robbie Collin15 October 2015 • 10:30am

‘The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up’ was how J.M. Barrie introduced his most famous creation in the title of his 1904 stage play – and in Joe Wright’s Pan, that guarantee has pretty much held firm.

Technically, this is a prequel to Barrie’s Peter Pan stories – although for the most part, the kind of revamping, reverse-engineering and postmodern horseplay that prequel-making normally entails is in short supply. In fact, aside from a couple of pirate sing-alongs to Nirvana and Ramones songs, Wright’s film is jubilantly uncool. Perhaps one of the best compliments you could pay it is that it could have been written 100 years ago.

The tone owes a little more to the adventure novels of Jules Verne than it does Barrie, while its opening scenes, which take place in a Blitz-battered London orphanage, are inescapably similar to early chapters of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, with their shared backdrops of hardship during wartime and tantalising rumours of magic behind locked doors.

It was on the doorstep of this forbidding establishment that Peter (played by the first-time actor Levi Miller) was left when he was a baby, and where he has since been under the care of Kathy Burke’s Mother Barnabas, the Miss Trunchbull-like gargoyle in charge.

Every morning when he wakes up, another few beds in the dormitory are empty, and Peter’s convinced that something funny is afoot. The boys assume evacuation is to blame, but it transpires that Mother Barnabas is selling them to a crew of Neverland pirates who need cheap labour for their mining operation.

They swoop by every night in their flying galleon, drop through the skylights on ropes and pull the children from their beds like hunting spiders – an image of almost Roald Dahl-like shiveriness that Wright stages as a kind of lunatic circus act. One such raid leads to what’s indisputably Pan’s finest sequence: a bombastic pitched battle between the flying ship and a squadron of Spitfires above the London rooftops. The cherry on this particular trifle is Mission Control, which is manned by a roomful of identical radio operators: think Kim Hunter in A Matter of Life and Death, except blonde, and multiplied by 20.

Levi Miller and Peter PanCredit:
Warner Bros.

Though Jason Fuchs’s script isn’t particularly beholden to Barrie’s work, some of its big ideas have been spun off from throwaway lines in it. The biggest one is its villain. In Barrie’s 1911 novel Peter and Wendy, John Darling reveals that Captain James Hook was once “Blackbeard’s bo’sun” – and so here we meet Blackbeard himself, who’s played by a typically charismatic though not immediately recognisable Hugh Jackman, and is marshalling a search for life-sustaining fairy dust, or ‘pixum’, in Neverland’s mines.

With a certain thudding inevitability, it turns out that a prophesy foretold all this: briefly, Peter is destined to lead a revolt against Blackbeard and free the children, using a latent ability to fly which he possesses thanks to his parentage. This is all tied up perfectly neatly as the film progresses, but it seems unnecessary, particularly as part of the early charm of Peter’s character is his apparent lack of a pre-ordained advantage beyond his nose for adventure. (A lovely, thought-provoking detail I wish the film had made a little more of: he’s dyslexic.)

Garrett Hedlund as HookCredit:
Warner Bros.

Far more intriguing is the new fedora-wearing friend he makes down the mines, James Hook himself – who is, ingeniously, nothing at all like the familiar Disney version of the character. He's not a captain, but a rakish adventurer, a genuinely nice guy, and still has the full complement of hands.

Hook played by Garrett Hedlund as a stack of matinee-idol tics: imagine Hedlund playing Armie Hammer playing Harrison Ford playing Indiana Jones, and that’s more or less his act. In league with Mr. Smee (Adeel Akhtar, enjoyably dopey), Hook and Peter hot-wire a flying galleon and scud across the sky towards the Neverwood, while Blackbeard plots his next move.

This is all refreshingly out of step with to the usual prequel MO, where the stage-setting for the original work can be so fussy, and the narrative so heavy with various omens and foreshadowings, that in and of itself, the new film can be as good as meaningless. (Which was what went wrong with Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful – and, arguably, Star Wars Episodes I-III.)

Instead, Pan just tells a rollicking story of its own, without worrying too much about getting the pieces in place for Barrie’s own work, or the much-loved Disney animation it also inspired. (Though if this film is successful enough to prompt a sequel, expect that to do much more along those lines.)

Rooney Mara as Tiger LilyCredit:
Warner Bros.

The only significant detail from the books to be seriously reworked is Neverland’s “Piccaninny tribe”, led by the princess Tiger Lily (a commendably kick-ass Rooney Mara), who here are a rainbow nation of actors of every imaginable caste and creed. (When the pirates attack their treetop village – the soft furnishings in which, it should be said, put Anthropolgie’s homeware department to shame – the rainbow becomes literal, and they vanish in clouds of multi-coloured dust.) It’s a fudge, but a necessary one, and stylishly pulled off.

Occasionally things get a little overcrowded, particularly during a sticky final act, but Pan has a certain timeless buoyancy that keeps it bouncing back. It’s a tale full of trapdoors, hidden switches and secret passageways, where flashbacks are told through animated wood carvings, and fairy dust is buried in its bedrock. The phrase "an eight-year-old could have thought of it" sounds like it should be an insult. But it isn’t here.